Open City

by Teju Cole

How petty seemed to me the human condition, that we were subject to this constant struggle to modulate the internal environment, this endless being tossed about like a cloud. Predictably, the mind noted that judgment, too, and assigned it its place: a little sadness.

WE EXPERIENCE LIFE AS A CONTINUITY, AND ONLY AFTER IT FALLS away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.

There is a long marriage between comedy and human suffering, and mental illness, in particular, is easily played for laughs. But I had dozens of cases that would have been ill-suited for the purpose, and sometimes it is hard to shake the feeling that, all jokes aside, there really is an epidemic of sorrow sweeping our world, the full brunt of which is being borne, for now, by only a luckless few.

Prayer was, I had long settled in my mind, no kind of promise, no device for getting what one wanted out of life; it was the mere practice of presence, that was all, a therapy of being present, of giving a name to the heart’s desires, the fully formed ones, the as yet formless ones.